The rise of right-wing political parties on both sides of the Atlantic has proved almost incomprehensible to mainstream political commentators. How can modern people in an integrated, cosmopolitan world embrace localism, racialism, and tribal identity?
The migrant crisis, and attacks perpetrated by Muslim terrorists, are ...
Diane Arbus: In the Beginning, an exhibition at The Met Breuer, 945 Madison Avenue, New York NY 10021, July 12 through November 27, 2016
Like the painter Francis Bacon and the illustrator Ralph Steadman, Diane Arbus’s photographic art has often been associated with the grotesque, the disconcerting, the alien. Her haunting ...
My parents and I arrived from Poland in Tel Aviv a few months before the outbreak of World War II. The rest of our extended family remained in Poland, and none of them survived. Three of my grandparents, my mother’s six sisters and one brother, five of my cousins -- ...
Stalin, in the first decade of Soviet power, backed the idea of “socialism in one country,” meaning that, until conditions ripened, socialism was for the USSR alone. When Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán declared, in July 2014, his intention to build an “illiberal democracy,” it was widely assumed that he ...
The Oval Office is up for grabs between Clinton and Trump, and I can’t remember the last time that I, living in a capitalist society, as a consumer, somehow ran out of options. If I can get my beer non-alcoholic and my ice cream fat-free, surely I can get my ...
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing has just published a brilliant book on the global trade in a certain kind of mushroom. As much as I’d like to report on it, I feel like I have to get my head around a previous landmark work of hers before attempting it. Here ...
While Hannah Arendt is most known for her reflections on totalitarianism and the banality of evil, eighteen years of statelessness (1933-1951) brought her philosophical questions of how one might be at home in the world into sharp relief. The fact that she was Jewish and German during the first half ...
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Public Seminar is a journal of ideas and debate published by the Public Seminar Publishing Initiative at The New School. Our free, nonprofit publication is made possible by the support of The New School and the generosity of our readers.
